Less Than Victors
by Cruelest Sea
Summary: From the start there was never any hope for any of them.
1. Broken Wings

**_Broken Wings_**

_"Here did she fall a tear, here in this place, I'll set a bank of rue, sour herb of grace." - Shakespeare, Richard II_

She's born a month early, tiny and frail, a firstborn child no one thinks will live.

They underestimate her even then.

oooOOOooo

She's named after an herb that blooms the color of sunlight, a pretty and delicate name that fits her.

The flowers close at night, folding up as if quietly going to sleep.

He wonders if it feels like dying.

oooOOOooo

He's named after a way of harvesting wheat, flailing the crop, a violent reaping.

It's fitting in a way, he supposes. He's strong. He's good at destroying.

oooOOOooo

He finds a mockingjay with a broken wing when he's seven. His parents tell him it won't live but he tends it, cupping it in his hands and splinting the wing, feeding it and keeping it warm. Eventually it heals and he releases it into the orchards.

It's the first kind thing he's ever done in his life, and he wonders at the time if it might not be the last.

oooOOOooo

She whistles them home from the orchards at the end of the day.

She should have been born a bird, he tells her once, darting through the trees and having no work except whistling her tune.

She stands on her toes to look up at him and a mockingjay lands on the branch above her head.

oooOOOooo

She loves music.

It's a useless thing to love, one that won't put food in her stomach or clothes on her back, and it means nothing to him.

But she loves it.

She's only a little girl, after all.

oooOOOooo

He tells himself if there's any decency left in the world, any mercy, she won't be Reaped. Anyone else but not her.

They call her.

oooOOOooo

There's no volunteers, not that he expected there to be. People may murmur about how young she is, how _tragic_ it is, but not enough to die in her place.

His hands clench into fists as they call his name.

oooOOOooo

Her hand slips into the middle of his palm and his fingers close around it, swallowing it up. He could break her between his hands without the least effort, crush her into dust.

But he won't.

She's like that bird when he was a child, a little broken thing that he pasted back together, a strong spirit tucked in a delicate body. He vows he won't be the one to kill her.

It's the second kind thing he's done in his life.

oooOOOooo

She's twelve years old. It should be a crime, he thinks, to kill a girl before she even turns thirteen, before she grows up, like killing a fledgling before it learns to sing.

The Capitol doesn't agree with him.

oooOOOooo

She's fast.

It's something at least, the only thing that might keep her alive.

They're never coming home, either of them, of course.

oooOOOooo

He doesn't see her again after they enter the arena. He doesn't stay with her or take her with him into the field.

Someone will kill her, he knows. It won't be him.

oooOOOooo

He hears the mockingjays stop singing mid tune, all sound cut off in an instant, silence so deafening he can't hear his pounding heartbeat.

He knows then that she's dead.

He sees her face in the sky that night, nestled against the stars and the never-ending darkness surrounding it. She looks younger in the picture, her fragile features making her age painfully obvious, golden eyes quietly lit with the ghost of a smile in a mockery of life.

He knew it all along. There wasn't a chance in the world for her, not when it came right down to it. He knew at the beginning that she'd never live to see thirteen.

The camera focuses in as a single tear escapes his eyes and runs down his face like a droplet of blood.

He hadn't known that he remembered how to cry.

oooOOOooo

He goes to the Feast.

The District 2 girl is already there, holding down the girl from 12, a knife to her face. Her lips are forming words, taunting insults, names, _Rue_.

She's clenched between his hands before he even realizes it, dangling in midair as he shouts as her, as she screams and struggles.

He breaks her.

She's small and it's absurdly simple but all his strength goes into it, rage, revenge, it doesn't seem to matter. She slips out of his hands and strikes the ground, twisted and dying.

The District 12 girl is crouched in front of him, eyes wide, expression frozen. His hands are trembling but his voice is steady as he lets her go.

He grabs both backpacks and runs as he hears Cato behind him, shouting the dying girl's name in a voice that hardly sounds human, mingling with the sound of the mockingjays. He'll be coming for him soon, him and not the girl on fire.

It's the third kindness. The last one.

oooOOOooo

The birds stop singing when he dies.


	2. But Our Souls Are Flying

_**But Our Souls Are Flying**_

_"6. Only insert a clean knife into your chest. Rusty ones will cause tetanus. Or infection."-Fifteen Ways To Stay Alive_

I.

They're special from the beginning.

Born just ten months apart, close enough to be mistaken for twins, with hair the color of the sun and features, even as toddlers, too perfect and flawless to have been created by anything other than science. Gloss and Cashmere, names that reflect something beautiful, something made and not born. They're strong and fast, bright for their age, unsurpassed in every way, and they shine far too brilliant for the eyes of the capitol to overlook even if their parents hadn't determined their fate from the beginning.

They're victors, marked from the moment they took their first breath, because anything else would be unacceptable.

II.

They're groomed and trained and driven, eight when she takes her first life, nine when he takes his.

She screams at night at the memory of the way the blood gurgled out of the open mouth and her mother slaps her until her ears ring and her throat is raw and silent, until her hand comes out to close around her mother's throat and her father drags her off and throws her toward the wall with the crack of a wrist breaking as she lands.

She's eight and half when she takes her second life and she smiles that time, a perfect, beautiful smile that sends the other children backing away, eyes wide and legs trembling.

They work as a team so the trainers keep them together, nodding approvingly as their knives find the targets in tandem, as if two minds are thinking as one. She's nine when she learns to balance the blade on point against her palm, earning her whispers from the others and a wide grin from him as he takes it in the span of an instant from her hand without nicking the skin.

He kisses her for the first time when he's twelve and she's thirteen, and she doesn't push him away, because it's a perfect kiss, not clumsy as it should be for his first, nothing like the ones who've kissed her already, crushed and bruised her because she's beautiful and desirable and once she's a victor she'll be far too expensive for them to buy.

She doesn't love him and he doesn't love her because even if they're children they know it's _wrong_, as twisted and damaged as everything else about their world.

Not that it matters.

III.

His games come first and there's never the slightest doubt in her mind that he'll win. She watches, with an expression of awe and pride, as he runs through the bloodbath of the Cornucopia, as he shines as brilliantly as the sun glinting through the trees, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake like Apollo with his deadly arrows.

When he returns, he's a victor, with a hardness in his eyes that wasn't there before, and he seems older and taller than he should, as if he's taken the strength from all the dead into himself.

In the darkness the first night they're alone, her fingertips find the remnants of healed wounds against the bones, invisible to the eyes, but she doesn't ask him about the games or whether the cannons sounded like music or a warning in his ears, or even if it hurt when the knife sliced open his arm. She doesn't want to know.

Her games are next, and he doesn't watch the screens until the end, only glimpses of her, with the blood matted into her hair and her features feral with bloodlust. She kills with a fierceness that stuns everyone but him, because gold is beautiful but hard, hard as stone, and cold as ice, and whatever of her was human was touched by Midas long ago.

When she comes back, a victor, of course, she's as different as he was, sculpted and changed. The ethereal beauty of the girl is replaced by the allure of the woman and all the men in the Capitol want her, desire her and have her, because money means nothing compared to her.

He hates them, all of them, and the capitol watches every clench of his jaw, every spasm in his throat as she flirts with the man who just bought her for the night, and she's good, so good he almost believes her himself. His fists clench and President Snow's eyes lift from his drink to meet his own.

_Be careful_ they say, with a warning hiss like a snake about to strike as his fingers break a cracker in half, _"i could just as easily snap her neck"_.

_Be careful, too_, he thinks back, expression open and unreadable, _or you might not live long enough to try_. Cashmere laughs at something the man says and he envisions him face down, choking on his own blood. But his hand smooths out, fingers uncurling limply as if from the hilt of a knife.

IV.

They are the best kept secret in the capitol, perhaps because they're no secret at all. They're gods among mortals, and the gods love whom they please, no matter how forbidden it may seem. They're beautiful and golden and everyone wants to be them, and everyone wants them.

"Our child would look like Midas's daughter." His fingers catch a strand of her hair and curl it between his knuckles, liquid gold against marble flesh. It's absurd, even in thought, because there never would or could be a child - the capitol is very careful about that - and neither of them would be any sort of parent anyway.

"Twins." She leans toward him, head against his back, and she can almost sense rather than feel where they erased the scars from muscle and skin and recreated him flawlessly. "Like Apollo and Artemis. Never without the other."

Later as his fingers trace the bone of her bare shoulder he finds the newest bruise, a remnant of the last one who bought her, as wide as his hand and deep into the flesh. Her breath catches, barely audibly, because even with him she would never show frailty.

"I'd slit his throat." _if I could_ He says through clenched teeth and her head tilts toward him, profile unmarred in the fading light, hair spilled out like a halo across the pillow.

"Not if I slit it first." _I know._ Her voice is deceptively soft, that gentleness that used to send chills up his spine as with a flash of lips drawn back over whiteness stained crimson and the twist of a knife she carved a hollow in someone's chest in the bloodbath of the arena.

This is how they love each other, because they never speak the words, never had the words spoken to them by anyone who mattered. You raise a child without love and they never learn how to receive or give it, but they understand killing, and it's a way to express, a way to feel where words fail.

It's enough. It has to be.

V.

The interviews for the Quarter Quell go as expected. Johanna Mason screams at the crowd, the pitiful morphling addicted pair stumble over their words and stare with frightened, glassy eyes, the girl turns in a wedding dress of flames, and the boy with the words brings the crowd to their feet with horror and shock and outrage.

They are like none of the above. She dabs at tears that fall from stinging, quickly drying eyes, he murmurs warm words of fondness to the men who bought and used her and the women who envied her beauty and turned a blind eye to their husband's lust. His hand clenches in her's as they join with the other victors, and it's the last time he touches her, a chaste, empty brush of skin that burns like flames licking at the nerves, causing permanent damage.

They don't look at each other as they enter the arena, or speak as they fight side by side, moving in tandem, in the Cornucopia. They cut down as many as they can and she doesn't consider the idea that it might come down to them, to him cutting her throat or she plunging her blade into his chest. She thinks she might have stooped to the theatrics of the last games, berries against the capitol, but the crowd would never have had sympathy for them anyway.

When he falls it's sudden, even if she was somehow expecting it, a gradual instant in which she's ripped in two, severed top to bottom. He dies in the space in takes her to blink, gone before she even comprehends the arrow sunken into his temple or the glaze of his eyes tilted away from her. His death is merciful, not slow like the one she watched gasp for breath through a lung torn in half, choking on bloody froth until the final wheeze. She doesn't touch him, or fall beside him, because she's strong, she's a victor, and victors don't weep over the dead and the sound of the cannon. She thinks she runs toward his killers, but they're faceless, blurs of nameless colors, and her knife is clenched in her hand to the blade, a thin line of scarlet already flowing down her palm with the pulsing of her heart.

There's a jolt as the world suddenly stops, and for a fraction of a second she can't seem to understand the sharpness in her chest, or the strange, flawed beat of a heart cut in half. The ax, buried to the hilt, keeps her standing in the moment before it's yanked free, and she slips down, falls in a tangle of gold and light, no _red_, so much red. Her eyes lift slightly, to the cameras and the sky where their pictures will display side by side, and she smiles, just once at the end.

When the people view the last second of her, lying lifeless, hair spilled like sunlight across the crimson circle, and him, half in and half out of the water, arrow still embedded in his skull, none of them think the same thing. Some are happy, it seems, two less victors to worry about, two less threats to the ones who could be dangerous or the ones they want to win. Some are saddened to see them lose, stunned that gods can fall as effortlessly as mortals. But most see it as inevitable, because despite all the words they were never gods at all.

They're still beautiful, like the flare of a sun as it burns away, of course. That was all they were ever meant to be, in the end.


End file.
